No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden

you that PT score. All I can tell you is if I show up, if I am selected, those scores are never going to happen again. I am not going to give you any excuses. That is on me. It is on nobody but myself.”
    I searched their faces to see if they believed me. There was no indication if they did or not. All I got were blank stares. The barrage of questions continued, designed to keep me off balance. They wanted to see if I could keep my composure. If I can’t sit in a chair and answer questions, then what am I going to do under fire? If they wanted to make me uncomfortable, they succeeded, but mostly I was embarrassed. These were people who I looked up to and aspired to be like and here I was, a young SEAL who had barely passed his sit-up test.
    At the end of the board, they dismissed me.
    “We’ll let you know within the next six months if you have been selected.”
    As I left the room I figured I had a fifty-fifty chance of making it.
    Back at Camp Pendleton, I smeared fresh green paint on my face and snuck back into the field to join my teammates for the last few days of the training mission.
    “How did it go?” my chief asked when I linked up with the team.
    “I don’t know,” I said.
    I wasn’t telling anyone about the fitness test. I knew there was a real chance I had failed.
    I was in the middle of my SEAL Team Five deployment to Iraq when I finally got the news. My platoon chief called me into our operations center.
    “You screened positive,” he said. “You’ll be getting orders to Green Team when we get back.”
    I was shocked because in my mind I had been preparing myself for the worst. I had it in my head I would have to re-screen. Now that I had been selected, I was committed to not making the same mistakes. I knew I would show up at Green Team prepared.



CHAPTER 2
Top Five/Bottom Five
    My lungs burned and my legs ached as I ran back from the ladder in the humid Mississippi summer. The pain was less physical and more about pride. I was screwing up. The pressure I was putting on myself was worse than anything I’d hear from the instructors. The mistake I’d made in the kill house was a result of losing focus, and I knew that was unacceptable. I knew I wouldn’t be in the course much longer if I couldn’t block out the pressure and focus on the tasks at hand. Candidates could get cut from the course on any given day.
    I ran back and stood outside the house. I could hear the crack of rifle fire inside as other teams cleared rooms. We had a few minutes to catch our breath before going back in for yet another iteration.
    Tom had climbed down from the catwalk and was outside when I got back. He pulled me aside.
    “Hey, brother,” he said. “It was exactly the right move in there. You covered your buddy, but there was no ‘moving’ call.”
    “Check,” I said.
    “I know back in your old command you guys did things your way and maybe you didn’t need the call there,” Tom said. “But here, we want textbook CQB and we want the verbage we asked for. If you are lucky to complete this training and go to an assault squadron on the second deck, trust me, you won’t be doing basic CQB. But here, under pressure, you need to prove to us that you can do even the most basic CQB. We have a standard, and you can’t move without a moving call.”
    The “second deck” was where all of the assault squadrons worked at the command back in Virginia Beach. During our first days in Green Team, we were told we were not allowed to go up to the second floor of the building. It was off-limits until graduation.
    So, getting to the second deck was the goal. It was the prize.
    I nodded and slid a new magazine into my rifle.
    That night, I grabbed a cold beer and spread my cleaning kit out on the table. I took a long pull and savored the fact I survived, another bite out of the proverbial elephant. I was one step closer to the second deck.
    During our CQB block of training, we lived in two large houses located near the shooting ranges and kill house. They were basically massive barracks beat to hell after hundreds of SEAL and Special Forces training rotations. The rooms were filled with bunk beds, but I spent most of my time downstairs in the lounge area. There was a pool table and a 1980s big-screen TV usually tuned to a sporting event. It was more background noise as guys cleaned their weapons or shot pool and tried to unwind.
    The SEAL community is small. We all know each other or have at least heard of one